Monday, April 18, 2011

Course on RPGs: Lecture and Discussion Topics

I'm starting to settle on a list of lecture and discussion topics for the RPG course.

Here's some of the introductory material followed by a list of topics I hope to address. As you can see, I try to create titles that will help encourage attendance :) I also try to link keywords from the readings into the lecture titles.

This course focuses on tabletop role-playing games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). We will approach the course from the dual perspective of cultural history and cultural studies. In addition to the critical analysis of academic research on RPGs, we will review popular material (texts and films), video-conference with gamers and authors, and conduct tutorials of RPG play and basic game design.

Although its antecedents have a much longer history, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson first published the game in the early 1970s. Over the last 40 years, D&D has given rise to the RPG industry, been revised into several editions, withstood a moral panic in the 1980s, the advent of computer RPGs in the 1990s, and the creation of massively multi-player online games in the 2000s.

What makes this game unique? Why do people continue to play this “strange” game with nothing other than with paper, pencils, their imagination, and oddly-shaped dice?

The majority of gamers play RPGs for social reasons. They play for group interaction and affiliation, and enjoy the cooperative style of play the game engenders. Some use RPGs to escape from an increasingly fast-paced modern existence – and to break their sense of the everyday. Set within a hyper-mobile, technology-based society, they express an anti-modern sentiment by eschewing computer games and consoles in favour of face-to-face human interaction. We will examine these questions, and many others, through an analysis of academic and popular sources, as well as experiential learning.

I approach this subject from the perspective of what American fandom scholar Henry Jenkins calls the “Aca-Fan” – an academic who identifies as a fan (or in this case, gamer). I have played D&D since the early 1980s, attended gaming conventions, and participate in online fandom. My academic background, alongside my familiarity with this gamer subculture, allows me to bring a unique perspective to this course.

Sounds wonderful. I am not familiar with De Certeau, but a quick look at Wikipedia reveal someone who I need to be more familiar with. Are you going to be using texts, or some sort of bound anthology of various PDFs?

Looks really interesting, esp. the governmentality and Certeauan bits, which make me think about everyday life around gaming and the nature of everyday life in game (I can't decide if I'd love or hate to see heterotopias in here).

everyone's course, like everyone's game, is their own, of course, so I'm fired by ideas for guest lecture topics rather than course additions. One such would be gameworld design vs anthropology, which I see as mirror images oc each other - attempts to construct possible/plausible societies, either unpacking them or packing them up in practice. I'd assign Geertz's Negara as a model game supplement.

I wrote an individual response to each of you and then blogger deleted it when I went to post. That figures. Here's the short version:

Roger, I have to make tough decisions relative to course time. So other than to highlight the importance of fantasy fiction as a founding element of D&D I won't be able to spend as much time on it as I would like. I love that stuff though.

Richard, how RPGs "break" notions of the everday is a prime reason why people play RPGs IMO. Unlike some, I don't view that as strict escapism. I think that's the simple answer that people point to, but I think there's more going on than that.

I'm huge on Geertz, ethnography, thick description, and his influence on the humanities and social sciences. He's the man.

Erik Mona, “From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons and Dragons,” in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin eds., Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (MIT Press, 2007): 25-30 (ISBN: 0262083566)

Ah, this looks interesting. Are you familiar with the RPG course done by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola a couple of years ago in the Tampere University? Their emphasis was rather different, though, and they covered LARP and electronic RPGs as well as tabletop stuff.

I took the course and wrote a number of blog posts on it. They can be found at http://nitessine.wordpress.com/category/roleplaying-101/

About Me

Greg is a boastful, hammer-wielding, red-bearded dwarf who started playing D&D in the early 1980s when hooked by the Red Box. When he's not obsessed with D&D he poses as a sleep-deprived professor of popular culture.